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Opportunity has knocked at last. Veteran actor/director Joel Miller is about to play a long-desired role, Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

Miller will be doing the role outdoors, in Repercussion Theatre’s Harry the King: The Famous Victories of Henry V, which opens on July 8 in Westmount Park.

“The more I get involved with it, the more I love it,” Miller said via cellphone from the Côte-St-Luc park where rehearsals were held this week. “I was aware that it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park — although it is indeed a walk in the park. I just discovered some muscles I never knew I had.”

Park Shakespeare, which entails location changes every couple of days as well as discreetly swatting mosquitoes mid-speech, tends to be a rite of passage for recent graduates, rather than late-career artists.

But Miller, who taught at the National Theatre School for almost 20 years and admits to being in his early 70s, is having a blast. Asked about his approach to Falstaff, Miller replied, “The whimsical part of myself wants to say that I drink a lot of booze.”

Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters. He’s a sodden, overweight, blowhard of a knight who becomes a companion to the wayward young Prince Hal (who becomes the heroic King Henry V). Playing Falstaff is an honour eagerly sought by mature actors, almost on a par with portraying King Lear. (The late, great William Hutt did both, plus Prospero, during his last years at the Stratford Festival.)

Harry the King is an adaptation by Repercussion Theatre artistic director Paul Hopkins and Concordia professor Karen Oberer — with help from McGill Shakespeare expert Paul Yachnin — that combines three Shakespeare plays: Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV Part Two, and Henry V, along with a dash of Richard II.

Miller is happy to acknowledge that he’s a tad slim for Falstaff. Padding will be added to create a suitable girth. He sees Falstaff as a “Lord of Misrule,” a person appointed by the court in medieval times to preside over the Feast of Fools, “when the nobility became servants to the commoners for one day.”

Besides being a boozer with a big appetite, Falstaff is a “parallel father figure to Prince Hal,” Miller said. “Because Hal’s father Henry IV has always been very critical of Hal and doesn’t like him hanging out with Falstaff and his gang. Through mockery and raillery, Falstaff is teaching Hal. He’s a total anarchist.”

Even Queen Elizabeth I was smitten with the old rogue, to the point that she asked Shakespeare to write Falstaff into a third play (he appears in Henry IV Parts One and Two, but not in Henry V). Thus he ended up in Merry Wives of Windsor. Many years later, Giuseppe Verdi wrote him an opera.

Hopkins said it’s the first time that Repercussion Theatre has tackled Shakespeare’s history plays. The 100th anniversary of the First World War seemed a good time to do them. “In Henry V, there’s a lot of battles and it’s often brought up when it comes to war,” he said, citing the Sir Laurence Olivier film Henry V, which was a vital part of Britain’s effort to rally the troops during the Second World War.

Harry the King, however, is an amalgam. “I’ve extracted the storyline of Hal, which spans four plays,” Hopkins explained. “He’s introduced at the very end of Richard II and then he becomes a character in Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two and Henry V.”

This paring down of the focus makes the main narrative easier to follow, he said, as fewer historical references need to be deciphered. “I used Shakespeare for most of the bridges,” he said. “What I’ve taken is the chorus, for example, in Henry V, and used that concept of the chorus throughout the whole thing as sort of a bridge between different scenes.”

The setting is Falstaff’s favourite haunt, the Boar’s Head Tavern.

Repercussion Theatre was recently forced to move its office because of a downtown condo development and now shares pace with ELAN (English Language Arts Network) at 460 Ste-Catherine St. W.

The company is struggling, Hopkins said: “The last five years have been very tough.” Two important sources of funding dried up. He has turned to crowdfunding (via Indiegogo) to finance the purchase of a new touring stage.

Its More Than a Stage campaign, with a goal of $10,000, was launched June 16 and closes Aug. 15. (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/more-than-a-stage).

Outdoor theatre faces many risk factors. “I live by the weather report,” Hopkins said. “I check it 10, maybe 15 times a day. It’s more the indecision. If there’s an 80 per cent risk of a downpour, do we risk it? Do we go outdoors or do we set up indoors?”

Still, a good production can withstand being tempest-tossed. “Last year, we had to cancel four or five shows,” he said. “But our A Midsummer Night’s Dream was so popular that the attendance increased from the year before, to about 13,000.”

Repercussion Theatre’s Harry the King: The Famous Victories of Henry V plays in Montreal-area parks July 4 to Aug. 2. It opens in Westmount Park on July 8 after previewing July 4-5 in Huntingdon and July 7 in Westmount Park. Free admission. Information: 514-931-2644 or visit www.repercussiontheatre.com

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